Weekend Listen: China vs the US: Kishore Mahbubani on a Zero-Sum Rivalry

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1:30Never before in human history have we had two powers of the size, the scale and reach of United States and China confronting each other in the way that they are today. China has become a tiger. Kishore Mahbubani, diplomat, academic, who has seen the rise of China from his native Singapore. You said what's happening now is like the Cold War, only America now is behaving as the Soviet Union was. It's a very unflattering comparison. The goal of my writings is not to say that China should win or United States should win. is to say that China and US should step back and reflect whether it is in their interest to engage in such a zero-sum contest.

2:19From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:29By now, you've probably seen a fair amount of news emerge out of Beijing. the pictures of that summit between Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping. It's important because face-to-face, one-to-one meetings like that don't happen very often. And yet, there's a much bigger story to tell than that of these two men, or any two leaders of these two countries, actually. The real story is an epic tale, one that has been unfolding for about 30 years. And it's about supremacy, a battle to be the world's number one power, which is why we wanted to dive into the US and China for this weekend. The story beyond the handshake, the readout, the truth social posts.

3:22And we thought we should discover it through the perspective of someone who's neither American nor Chinese. Someone who has witnessed the rise of China and its relationship with the United States from a country that is tiny in comparison. Singapore. It's Kishore Mahbubani, who was for three decades a Singaporean diplomat, rising to become its ambassador at the United Nations. He's from Singapore's minority Indian community. And although I've known him for years, I never realised the circumstances in which he grew up in the 1950s and 60s, how hard life was in Singapore at that time. He's written many books, but his most recent is called Living the Asian Century.

4:12It's also his most personal. As you listen, you might well want more on the people, the places, the moments in time we talk about. And for that context, have a look at Bloomberg.com forward slash Michelle, because that's where you'll find this episode in written form, with my reflections and the pictures that add to the story. So here's Kishore Mahbubani in his own words, talking first about why the US and China matters so much right now.

4:50Kishore Mahbubani:It is by far the most important contest of our time. And I think what most people don't realise is that never before in human history have we had two powers of the size, the scale and reach. of United States and China confronting each other in the way that they are today. Because the United States is a remarkably powerful country, much more powerful than any other great power has been in human history. And of course, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was left alone as the sole superpower in the world. And few expected China to come up so quickly. But now China has clearly achieved near parity with the United States in the scope and scale of its power too.

5:47Kishore Mahbubani:And therefore, you notice when President Trump launched his tariff wars on all the countries in the world, only one country stood up to the United States, and that was China. In this contest then, do you see it as bigger than the economics of it? the desire on the part of the United States to maintain its position as the world's biggest economy. Are you talking about power as something broader than that, a quest to become the world's only superpower? Well, you know, geopolitics has been around for about 2 ,000 years or so. And so there are certain habits of behavior that all great powers share in common.

6:28Kishore Mahbubani:and the number one power of the time always wants to preserve its number one position and not give it up gracefully and say, okay, my turn is up. Why don't you take over? It's not like in the world of business where IBM will give way to another company, for example. But in geopolitics, it's a zero-sum game, sadly. And so even though Washington DC today is a very badly divided capital politically. But when it comes to China, there's a near universal consensus that it is in the interest of the United States to stop the rise of China. And that's why the actions against China remain consistent. Whether or not you have President Trump or President Joe Biden, it makes no difference.

7:23It's not about personalities. It's about the logic of geopolitics. And would you say that that is a foolish desire to stop the rise of China? Because this is the way the world is going, that China is on a path to become the dominant economic power and the demography is on its side?

7:47Kishore Mahbubani:Well, no, I would say it's not wise policy of the United States to stop the rise of China because China can no longer be stopped. And the only way to stop China is to ask the Chinese government to stop improving the livelihood of its own people. Right? That's the only way that China will stop growing. But China still has a long way to go. its per capita income is way behind that of the United States. There's a long way to go. So clearly the Chinese people want to improve their lives and the Chinese economy will keep growing. Of course, there'll be ups and downs like in any other economy. But equally importantly, and this is the key point, we live now today in a small, interdependent, fragile planet, Earth.

8:41Kishore Mahbubani:and our overall priority as humanity should be to try and preserve planet Earth before we lose it to climate change and other forces. So there is therefore a larger imperative need for the US and China to collaborate, to deal with many common challenges in the world rather than to engage in a zero-sum game with each other. I've used a different analogy in a former book of mine, The Great Convergence, saying that the world has shrunk, the 193 countries are no longer 193 separate boats, the 193 countries and 193 separate cabins on the same boat. If you're cabin on the same boat, there's no point protecting your cabin if the boat is sinking.

9:32So therefore, there's a common interest for US and China to come together and take care of the planet Earth

9:40Kishore Mahbubani:because that's far more important than whatever you gain to make in this geopolitical game of one-upmanship. Take me back to 1993 and a moment between the two countries that you saw for yourself as a Singaporean diplomat at the APEC summit of that year. What did you see and why did it matter? Well, this was the first meeting ever within the new President of the United States then, Bill Clinton, and the leader of China, Jiang Zemin. And you may recall that in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton famously stood out from George H.W. Bush by saying, unlike President Bush, I will not coddle the butchers of Beijing.

10:30Kishore Mahbubani:So there was a lot of tension in the air, wondering whether or not Bill Clinton would launch an attack on President Chiang Tse-min. And indeed, President Chiang Tse-min himself was a bit nervous because when he read out his own speech, he read it so fast that the Taiwanese delegates said to him, slow down, the interpreters cannot follow you. So there was a lot of nervousness in the air. And amidst all this nervousness, when we had a short break for coffee, the first person President Bill Clinton approached was President Chang Semin. And I saw with my own eyes, Bill Clinton coddling Chang Semin in a way that he said that he would never do.

11:16Because that... So it was quite a remarkable... And everyone in the room... Noticed it. ...was watching with incredible sort of relief and happiness. that what could have been a painful confrontational meeting turned out to be a really remarkable breakthrough in US-China relations. And the Butcher of Beijing reference was won to Tiananmen Square a few years before.

11:41Kishore Mahbubani:Exactly. He was referring to what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. And what did that moment, which you witnessed, then lead to? What did it unlock in the years ahead? Well, I think it enabled the renormalization of US-China relations because, as you know, Tiananmen set the US-China relationship back quite badly. And as you know, before then, of course, during the Cold War, because the United States needed China as a counterweight against the Soviet Union, the United States would always bent over backwards to accommodate China. And I can tell you an even more horrifying story. In 1981, there was something called the International Conference on Cambodia, where there was a disagreement between China and the ASEAN countries about whether or not the government or Pol Pot should be allowed to go back to Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese troops left Cambodia.

12:53Kishore Mahbubani:and China took the correct position under international law, which is that when a foreign invader leaves, Pol Pot comes back. But ASEAN countries said, no, this cannot happen because no country will accept the return of Pol Pot. And fortunately, the United States intervened. So we thought the United States would of course cite the ASEAN countries who were calling for free elections. Instead, to our absolute horror, the United States said, don't stand up to China. We need China for standing up to Soviet Union. So that was one of the most amazing things I saw in my life. But that showed you how far we had come between 1981, where China was being accommodated all the time, to the end of the Cold War.

13:40Kishore Mahbubani:And then China was an irrelevant partner then. But while saying that neither country should be treating it as the contest that they are. I think overall, you're much more critical of US policy towards China than the other way around, aren't you? I read that you said that what's happening now is like the Cold War, only America now is behaving as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, that when the Soviet Union behaved unilaterally, ignored international opinion. And that was a time when America acted multilaterally and marshal global opinion to its side. It's a very unflattering comparison. Well, that comparison has been made by other scholars too, that in the contest between United States and Soviet Union, American society was flourishing, but Soviet society wasn't flourishing.

14:38Kishore Mahbubani:But today in the contest between United States and China, the bottom 50 % of the American population, they haven't seen their standard of living improve in several decades. And indeed, as you know, the indicators of people at the bottom are very bad in the United States. And therefore, the logical thing for United States to do is to first focus on uplifting its people rather than to try to engage in a zero-sum geopolitical contest with China. But I can tell you in geopolitics, unfortunately, common sense doesn't work. Because this desire to be number one is so somehow or other deeply ingrained into the human brain that's very hard to persuade the policymakers.

15:28Hey, step back and think, what is a better approach to take? The goal of my writings is not to say that China should win or United States should win. the goal of my writings is to say that China and US should step back and reflect whether it is in their larger long-term interests to engage in such a zero-sum contest. And the standard of living of the Chinese population has risen immeasurably in recent decades. There are, of course, though, rights that they do not enjoy compared to Americans, freedom of expression, the right to choose their own leaders.

16:05Kishore Mahbubani:Well, you're right. I mean, China has rescued 800 million people out of poverty. That's two and a half to three times the population of the United States. And that's an amazing achievement. But you're right, the Chinese don't enjoy many of the rights that Americans enjoy. But Chinese society has got its own political DNA, which has been embedded in the Chinese society only for 3 ,000 years. And over 3 ,000 years, the big lesson that the Chinese people have learned is that when there's chaos in the center, in the capital, the people suffer. But when there's political stability and control in the center, the people prosper and flourish.

16:59And when people say that the Chinese people are not free, I ask a very simple question. If the Chinese people are not free, why is it over 130 million Chinese people leave China each year and then, amazingly, using their own two feet, return to China every year? Now, if China was this harsh, dark, communist gulag that is portrayed in the Anglo-Saxon media, the Chinese people are irrational. They shouldn't be resurgent in China. But the Chinese who are returning to China are the ones who have experienced life overseas. So China, to put it simply, is a different civilization from Western civilization.

17:58So the kinds of society that the Chinese people want at the end of the day will be different from Western society. And that's something that we got to learn to live with in the new multi-civilizational world. I hear what you're saying. And I'm also at the same time thinking of the evidence that emerged a few years ago about those re-education camps in Western China, in Xinjiang province, where Chinese Muslims were detained, some as young

18:29Kishore Mahbubani:as in their teens, right up to people in their 70s, because the state felt they needed re-educating about their beliefs. Well, there's no question that China's internal arrangements are not the same as those of Western society. But you know, when the West raises concerns about the Muslims in China, the one comment that the rest of the world makes is that in general, the West doesn't like Muslims. In general, the West doesn't like Chinese. but for some strange reason, they love Chinese Muslims. And it's because it's a political tool to be used to embarrass China. Unfortunately, that political tool no longer works because the whole world is saying, if you in the West are so concerned about the conditions of Muslims who are oppressed, what have you said about Gaza?

19:32What have you done about Gaza?

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22:30You have seen international relations through your work as a Singaporean diplomat over many years. But I want to ask you about your life story, too, because I think you have lived history in a really interesting way, in that you came of age in Singapore just at the moment as it was getting its independence from Malaysia after British colonial rule had come to an end. And when I read your book, Living the Asian Century, I was really struck by the hardship that your family experienced and that you experienced that when you started school in 1954, you were seriously underweight and you had to be put on a special feeding program in school?

23:17Kishore Mahbubani:Well, looking back now, this is a strange thing to say. I feel that it was almost a privilege to have grown up in a poor third world society. And you're right, I was put on a special feeding program at the age of six because I was technically undernourished. And I lived in a house with no flush toilet until I was 13 years old. One of the biggest changes in my life was when the flush toilet appeared because I felt that my sense of dignity improved dramatically. And also, my family was very poor. My father went to jail. The debt collectors came to our house to try and auction off the furniture in our house.

23:59Kishore Mahbubani:So I went through a very rough third world childhood. My mother was the one who took the brunt of all this pain and difficulties. And not once did she crack. And every time in my life I go through a difficult patch and when I feel depressed, I just think of my mother and I say, my mother never cracked under much greater pressure. How can I ever crack? So that resilience that my mother gave me was an amazing gift in my life. She had had a narrow escape from communal violence in what is now Pakistan at the independence of India in 1947. Your father had obviously had a very difficult early life sent from what was then British India to Singapore and starting to work manual labor at the age of 13.

24:53Kishore Mahbubani:Yes, both my parents, none of them ever went to university or not even to high school or even secondary school, by the way. And my father, unfortunately, was often at a very young age and at the age of 13 was sent to the British colony in Singapore and ended up quite naturally without adult supervision, engaged in several bad habits like smoking and drinking and gambling. And so my mother, who had an arranged marriage, had no idea that she was marrying an alcoholic gambler. And that, of course, was the root of our problems. And my mother too, as you said, had a close shave because she was in a train leaving Pakistan in the middle of the night in the desert when her last compartment got decoupled.

25:41Kishore Mahbubani:And if a mob had come along, she would have been killed. But she survived. So I guess our family has had lots of close shifts. Yeah. But as you say, in Singapore too, when you were growing up, it was a poor neighborhood. Few of your peers even finished school, let alone went to university. And that description in your book of living without a toilet, it's so striking compared to what Singapore is today. That each morning, the night soil men went around the neighborhood. They opened a small door in the wall of every house, pulled out a metal can filled with 24 hours worth of faeces and urine from the occupants of the house.

26:22Kishore Mahbubani:The sights and smells of that experience never go away. But what's amazing is that Singapore's per capita income at independence was around$500, the same as Ghana in West Africa. but today Singapore's per capita income is$94 ,000 among the highest in the world and no country in the world has gone from$500 per capita to$94 ,000 per capita in 60 years or less than one human lifetime. Now that's one of the most remarkable stories of human history And again, that's been one of my great privileges, to travel this remarkable journey upwards with my fellow Singaporeans. It didn't feel that way in 1965, did it?

27:15I think you were 17, still in school. Singapore left the federation it was in with Malaysia. And there's a sense of despondency everywhere about how it can possibly survive on its own.

27:27Kishore Mahbubani:Well, I remember the day vividly, August 9, 1965. when Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation. And no one in Singapore celebrated our independence because we thought Singapore was doomed. And there was a simple reason why Singapore was doomed, because Singapore was a city. And when a city is cut off from its hinterland, which Malaysia was the hinterland for Singapore, it can die. It's like taking a heart out of a body and expecting the heart to survive without the supply of blood and other materials to the heart. So it was a very difficult time and no one expected Singapore to succeed in the way that it did.